It has become terribly fashionable to lament the ongoing existence of Andrew Tate. For the blessed minority who still know nothing of this peculiar man, catapulted to fame by the invisible hand of social media only then to get slammed by the iron fist of Big Tech, the following details should be more than enough.
Born in Luton, England, Tate made his millions as a pornographer and casino tycoon in Romania. Before the financial success and his ascent to global stardom as a machismo, outspoken guru offering life advice to young men on TikTok, Tate enjoyed an impressive career as a kick-boxer. The fighting spirit, the fast cars, and the flamboyant entourage of scantily clad women are all a key part of Tate’s image, but thanks to his relentless self-promotion and his addiction to courting controversy with intemperate remarks, this post-modern King Solomon is now infamous throughout the world. Content posted under the hashtag #AndrewTate has been watched more than 13 billion times and counting. He is on record as having said all sorts of things which have made him, in many ways justifiably, persona non grata. A lot of it is just ‘oh look at how edgy I am’ locker-room talk: “women can’t drive,” “wives are their husband’s property,” etc. At other times, it gets much darker. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch!” Tate shouts in one video, talking about how he would react to a woman if she accused him of cheating.
It is not always clear when Tate is actually being himself and when he is, rather, amusing himself. Particularly in an appearance on the Your Mom’s House Podcast, he seemed to shift from impassioned, even intelligent diatribe on serious subjects at some junctures, to breaking character at others. Often, after an especially grotesque comment, ill-disguised laughter (perhaps even caused by his own cartoonish alter-ego) would get the better of Tate. Are we always seeing the real man? His critics do not care. Still less are they interested to learn whether, buried deep beneath the obnoxious, shock-jock bravado, Tate might have some valuable things to say. Back in August, the social media giants caved to the squawking, intolerant ‘wokesters.’ Tate was banned by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
As will be apparent, Tate has very little time for political correctness. He often serves, therefore, as a strong defence against the continued spread of harmful but fashionable orthodoxies. He objects to the way in which the feminization of men has weakened the backbone of the West and made the inhabitants of decadent, advanced democracies more vulnerable to top-down control and social engineering. He encourages young men to be aspirational, enterprising, and independent-minded. It is no real surprise that such basic messages should resonate in a modern culture which, at least according to the ascendant narrative, demands that men—many of whom feel neglected, apathetic, even invisible—apologize for their apparent privileges and prostrate themselves before the altar of social justice. Tate, by contrast, calls on men to take up the struggle of an adventurous life. By his reckoning, that means shunning petty mandates, making loads of money, and striving for masculine excellence. He also boasts the virtue of being, at least on occasion, somewhat funny.
But this man is not just a jacked Jordan Peterson, only lacking the degrees and sporting a skinhead. He has said some grotesque things. For example: “The reason 18 and 19 year old [girls] are more attractive than 25 year old girls is because they’ve been through less d**k.” True enough, in most cultures throughout history, virginity has been highly valued. In this sense, Tate’s statement can be interpreted as a uniquely revolting way of stating a basic principle of social conservatism: that women should prize their sexuality enough to save it, rather than degrading themselves by lowering the standards a man must meet to obtain it. According to Tate, it is not “righteous,” still less attractive, for a young lady to have had countless sexual partners.
But why should this standard apply only to women? Tate’s own definition of the good, by which he claims to live, reads more like an ode to licentiousness: “I think righteousness is living true to your heart, and doing good by people, not ‘snaking’ anybody, not lying to anybody.” On what grounds, then, does Tate condemn women for acting in a promiscuous fashion? “Living true to your heart” provides no sound basis for condemning female sexual vice as Tate routinely does. If Tate is “righteous” for “living true to his heart,” and his heart rules that sleeping with scores of women is not only permissible but a testament to his masculine vigour, then why should the same not also hold for these women themselves? Moreover, Tate’s virile, liberated ideal of manliness, according to which self-restraint and Christian gentility are thrown in the bin, really depends on the ready availability of fallen women. On Tate’s own criteria, how else can a man be great if not by treating women as trophies to be collected? And yet, again according to Tate’s criteria, for a woman to reduce herself to a trophy, an accessory that testifies to the sexual conquests of men like Tate, is for her to lose her value. For one sex to be virtuous, the other must be drenched in vice.
Tate would probably reply that, while ‘high-value’ men should be free to sleep around, they are entitled to expect perfect monogamy from their women. As such, there is no real contradiction between the male pursuit of excellence through sexual prowess and the female virtue involved in remaining loyal and self-restrained. Tate’s ideal man can have sex with countless women without making them into ‘sluts,’ so long as these women are bound exclusively to him.
This is not a convincing escape. First, Tate has openly boasted about engaging in one-night stands. Does he really expect that these lucky ladies, the vast majority of whom never hear from him again, will for monogamy’s sake withdraw from the sexual arena following this single encounter? In reality, the more Andrew Tates there are in the world, the more promiscuous women will be needed to fuel their profligate lifestyles. The cancelled social media star is a leading consumer of dissolute ‘hoes,’ yet goes around identifying as “righteous” and presuming to tell the rest of us, as if we did not already know, that there is nothing more beautiful than a modest, devoted, self-respecting lady.
Second, there is also a public interest in sexual relations—a fact which Tate, oddly enough, has at other times acknowledged. A culture that embraces ‘enforced monogamy’ will, ceteris paribus, produce the optimal conditions in which to raise children. But in order to perform its proper social function, ‘enforced monogamy’ must work both ways. Tate’s liberal critics, therefore, are mistaken in condemning him from the clichéd angle that maximal sexual autonomy is great, but should be embraced by women as much as men. Conservatives have a stronger retort: monogamy is desirable for collective social flourishing and must therefore make a claim on everyone, including the men who may otherwise be tempted to become indulgent, serial playboys like Andrew Tate. Meanwhile, on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Tate hinted that he secretly has numerous wives. He certainly keeps a string of sexual lovers. Such polygamy, practised on a societal scale, is profoundly destabilizing.
Tate calls himself a libertarian, so he regards individual freedom as the ultimate value in political, social, and moral life. But there is in fact a strong Nietzschean side to Tate’s understanding of liberty, for he equates freedom not only with the absence of external constraint, but with the cultivation of ‘knightly-aristocratic’ virtues which facilitate the maximal exercise of individual power. If Tate were a literary genius, he might give the following list of the keys to virtue: “powerful physical development, a richness and even superabundance of health, together with what is necessary for maintaining life, on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney—on everything, in fact, which involves strong, free and joyous action.” Tate would only add “sex” and perhaps even “threesomes” to Nietzsche’s catalogue of strong, free, and joyous activities. The odd bit comes when Tate attempts to unify this heroic, individualistic philosophy of personal salvation with a traditionalist take on sexual ethics, though of course men are exempt from the strictly monogamous standards which he believes women alone should apply to their own sexual behaviour. We may regard Tate, then, as an entertaining, unlikely mix of Ayn Rand, Lord Byron, and Mary Whitehouse. Tate’s recent conversion to Islam further complicates the picture. The strange move may be sincere, but there are many who suspect, given his track record, that it is little more than an attempt to put a divine sheen on his polygamous incontinence.
The sexual revolution, it seems, has created two male types. There is of course a varied spectrum, but young men increasingly tend in one of two directions. They either become so-called ‘incels’ (shorthand for ‘involuntary celibates’), frothing with such resentment at their circumstances that they only make themselves further undesirable to women, or they are made into ultra-proud, promiscuous hedonists. Resentment should never be encouraged. The incels should look inwardly for solutions to their sexual failure before scapegoating the women who are repulsed by or indifferent to their existence. Still, there is a sense in which the second type of man, who triumphs where the first type abjectly loses, makes life harder than it needs to be for these incels.
Sexual liberation has turned dating from a respectful game of courtship, with established patterns of conduct, into a loveless, toxic blood-sport. A culture that prizes the norm of ‘one man and one woman’ creates rotten conditions for the libertine scoundrel, but it does also discipline the male instinct for aggression by giving every man a reasonable chance in the sexual sweepstakes. In our semi-polygamous society, meanwhile, the overdose of sexual freedom means the fact that eighty per cent of the women pursue just twenty per cent of the men makes practically everyone miserable and unfulfilled. These men are under no cultural pressure to pick just one woman wisely and devote the rest of their lives to her happiness. Liberated as these new men are, they can pick as many as they choose. Following in the footsteps of Andrew Tate, they will then boast endlessly about their high body counts.
This does three things. First, it leads to despair among the vast majority of men who must live without female attention. Second, it makes the tiny minority of successful men develop a cynical attitude to women, whom they will now forever associate with ease and sensation. Finally, it deludes many women into believing that, just because they can command the attention of a ‘high value’ man for a single evening, they will also be able to command that attention long enough for what began as casual sex to blossom into a loyal, flourishing relationship. The bottom eighty per cent of men will thus continue to be neglected, as the majority of women are too busy trying to tame the very men who have profited most from sexual liberation and are therefore least likely to give up the narcotic of promiscuous gratification. The ideal of the strong Christian gentleman and the old belief in ‘enforced monogamy’ were thrown out as ‘patriarchal constructs’ in the 1960s. Andrew Tate is our punishment.
Still, somewhere behind Tate’s impressive bodily frame and jock bravado, there is a sound social conservative trying to get out. “I believe in family, I believe in children,” he says on Piers Morgan’s show. But these obvious goods require restraint and sacrifice on the part of fathers at least as much, if not more, as they demand virtue of mothers. Tate preaches old-fashioned sexual ethics to the women of this world, yet encourages men to combine a Nietzschean drive towards ‘master morality’ with the hollow, playboy hedonism of Hugh Hefner. No wonder there are now swathes of unsatisfied women. Given the importance of boundless pleasure to the few men who thrive in our ‘mad-max’ sexual dystopia, those who can find a loving, committed boyfriend, still less a husband, willing to give her undivided romantic love and erotic attention, are dwindling in number.
Still, it is no good criticizing Tate out of resentment. I have mentioned Nietzsche, one of Christianity’s most challenging critics in the history of thought. The German philosopher argued famously that the religion of faith, hope, and charity triumphed not through the influence of the Holy Spirit, but due to a cunning psychological trick played by the weak against the strong. The wretched slaves of pagan antiquity, claimed Nietzsche, found in Christianity a universal ethic which not only sanctified their lowly, pathetic condition, but could be weaponized against domineering, would-be Caesars. For this reason, Nietzsche believed the animating emotion of Christianity to be not love, but ressentiment. One of the most gripping ideas to emerge from this polemic is the sense that it is at best suspect and at worst invalid for us to condemn an act if we are physically or spiritually incapable of performing it ourselves. After all, without this test, it is impossible to know whether we condemn it out of genuine outrage or wounded envy. No doubt there are today many men jumping on the bandwagon to attack Tate less out of principle than an agonizing sense of jealousy.
Nietzsche was correct to identify the ways in which cowardice and resentment often cloak themselves in the more illustrious colours of high-minded moral judgement. Kant had said “ought implies can” to emphasize the fact that a system of ethics must be built on the presupposition of free will or risk incoherence. Nietzsche then came along to add, in effect, that “ought not implies could.” A truly virtuous form of masculinity would involve men becoming capable of imitating Andrew Tate and then willingly refusing to do so. For what could be less admirable than a man who makes hateful, performative utterances about the villain in the company of others while living vicariously through his exploits in his own daydreams?
